Dear Friends,

It’s ok not to be ok.  It’s not just a Mental Health meme, but something I’d like you to think of more broadly, especially given the violence our culture keeps pumping out as if there is no end in sight.  

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been noticing a common theme about all of the violence being meted out by the Religious Right and White Supremacists against women, people of color, and the poor.  While our media has done a decent job of helping cover some of the most troubling and theocratic aspects of this violence, often done in the name of being ‘pro-life.’  But they aren’t asking the right questions of themselves, nor the people they are covering, and they are absolutely failing to see and show us as readers how dangerous, fringe ideas are becoming mainstream.  

One of the first articles I’ve found to start (but not finish) making some of the connections is a Time Magazine article that came out May 21st called “What the Buffalo Tragedy Has to Do With the Effort to Overturn Roe” by Jasmine Aguilera and Abigail Abrams (Where the Buffalo Gunman and the Anti-Abortion Fringe Meet | Time).  I’ve posted it in our ECSM facebook page if the link doesn’t work for you, but I think it is important to highlight a few things from the article.  

The article gives a definition of the so-called “Great Replacement Theory” conspiracy theory.  While other journalists have pointed out how the conspiracy has been explicated by Tucker Carlson on Fox News, encouraging the mass shooter in Buffalo to view his own twisted views, this article points out how some in the ‘pro-life’ world could use this conspiracy theory as a way of recognizing that white women may use abortion to decrease their birth rate, which they believe needs to be resisted, even if it means they force white women to have children they’d rather not carry and care for.  

“The anti-abortion movement was born in the 19th century of white fears of a declining whit birth rate, says Jennifer Holland, assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. The idea was that by allowing white women to receive abortions, lawmakers were leaving white populations vulnerable to demographic “replacement” by non-white or immigrant groups with higher birth rates.  In the 1870s and ‘80’s, the fear was primarily focused on Jewish and Catholic immigrants, especially those from Italy or Ireland, who had higher birth rates than white Protestants at the time; now, white power organizations that embrace “replacement theory” focus on Black and Latino communities that have higher birth rates than whites.   

While the Buffalo gunman did not explicitly mention the word “abortion” in his manifesto, he references birth rates more than 40 times, according a TIME analysis, and repeatedly expressed his belief that “white birth rates must change.” 

Of course, there’s been a recognition by many that such thoughts – while not a part of the rhetoric of the ‘pro-life movement’ itself – are definitely both inside the right-wing religious movement as a whole, despite the protests of those who wish to distance themselves from the racist portion of the political right.  As the article notes, “Nearly one in three American adults now hold a belief that is in line with the “replacement theory.””  The article then goes on with a history of this theory in the anti-abortion movement, reminding us that “Prior to the Civil War, abortion was legal with minimum restrictions in the U.S.” Please see the article for the whole history, though it is fair to say that post-civil war legislatures used abortion restrictions for demographic purposes, with some on the far-right being against immigration and abortions for white women only.  

Now, if you have never heard of the U.S. history of forced sterilization of Indigenous women, Black women (especially immigrants), and other women of color, then I’m afraid I have bad news about American history.  The horrors of women having their ability and right to give birth on their own terms taken away from them by their own doctors, or those serving immigrants is often white-washed.  Over 67,000 women were ‘legally’ sterilized between 1907 and 1963 during the heights of the “eugenic legislation era.”  According to Wikipedia, 1981 was the last year in which Oregon performed the last legal forced sterilization in the US (even California legalized them – Forced sterilization policies in the US targeted minorities and those with disabilities – and lasted into the 21st century), though there have been accusations that the Trump Administration may have allowed doctors in the ICE refugee camps at our border, or the doctors just did it without letting their patients know, without permission, while under anesthesia for other health procedures (Immigration Detention and Coerced Sterilization: History Tragically Repeats Itself | News & Commentary | American Civil Liberties Union).  

We must recognize that “early” Democratic support for “Roe v. Wade” – before Nixon had his “Southern Strategy” – wooing the southern racists to the Party of Lincoln away from the Democratic Party when they switched sides on many issues related to race, slavery and civil rights.  But since then, the newer Democratic coalition has been more supportive, but as with any politicians, they’ve not found a real resistance to the forces that have come together to make life harder for the poor and people of color.  I personally have been quite disappointed in their response to the pressure multiple forces are having on the viability of our Democracy.  

I see the bills in Texas and Florida accusing parents of Trans youth of child abuse if they allow their own children to have the health care of helping them address their gender identity and expression.  The bills written here are right now serving to threaten the loss of children from any families receiving such health care.  The “Father Knows Best” philosophies behind these bills are similar to the patronizing way the SCOTUS has been discussing whether women have the rights to make decisions about their own bodies and when to have children.  It is right out of the Dictators Playbook to not accept election results that you don’t agree with, so as to condition the people for an overthrow in future elections.  Setting up laws that allow state Secretaries of State to overrule the actual elections that we have trusted for decades.  

When we add these components to the shooter in Buffalo who went to another community to shoot Black people in one of the only supermarkets in the neighborhood where they live, we are seeing a pattern of violence coming from the Religious Right.  When a ‘pro-lifer’ bombs an abortion center, or kills a doctor, we see the pattern.  When we watch juries let teenagers who shoot people off the hook for self-defense, we are seeing a pattern.  When we see the same kind of actions used by the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi party and South African Apartheid, we see a pattern.  When we see party platforms that include the phrase “Return America to its rightful owners,” we see the pattern of white men attempting to enforce their privilege once again.  When we see polls that 40% of Republicans expressing an openness to political violence under certain circumstances, we see a pattern, and it’s beginning to look like the beginning of another civil war.  

They are trying to overthrow this country for their own power, that’s why they feel threaten by the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, want to ban books, and even attempt to ban ideas like Critical Race Theory, which is usually only taught in Legal and Social Work graduate programs.  As I’ve shared in preaching about the threat of the Dominionists in the Religious Right, many have been teaching a revisionist history that America has always been a Christian nation, rather than the secular, pluralist representative Republic that rejected state-based official religions in Massachusetts and Maryland as safe havens for Protestants and Catholics when we ratified the 1789 constitution we now live under.  When the states ratified that constitution, it was with a separation of church and state, as our founding parents wrote, because they didn’t want to risk the same kind of religious wars that killed hundreds of thousands in Europe.  In a majority rules country, when it didn’t work to push their ideas through Congress, they have reverted to taking over the courts and as many state legislatures as they can to meet their goals through minority rule.  

Sadly, many of these actions are being enacted in the very name of the Christ we call upon every Sunday.  I’m fearful for our nation.  If you are too, it’s time for us to talk about it.  They must hope they have conditioned us not to respond, as many continue to respond by not reading the news.  They may be counting on the stress of these current times immobilizing the many, but for the sake of our friends who are literally in the cross hairs of these people, its time for some real conversations and some real action of our own.  

Together we serve,

Pastor Will 

Photo credit: M. Levy for TIME from the first article quoted in this blog.

So, one of the reasons only 30% of Americans are supporting the SCOTUS fiasco, is because the vast majority of faith perspectives have a mixture of positions on abortion, women’s control of their bodies, freedom of conscience etc., whereas, the evangelicals and ‘pro-life’ catholics focus just on the right of the fetus.

Abortion isn’t the only issue: Read this from Rabbi Arthur Waskow of The Shalom Center to understand more what is at stake for Jewish Americans and others who support abortion rights and women’s full humanity.

~~~~~~~~~

The Shalom Report

In Memory of Eva Cowan Waskow

Roman Catholic Bishops, the Supreme Court, & Women: It’s Not Just Abortion: Do Women Have Freedom of Conscience? Or Are They Occasions of Sin? Is Religion Love or Compulsion?

[On September 15, 2021, an earlier version of this article below was published by Lilith, a lively and intelligent feminist Jewish magazine. A fuller critique of the Augustinian anti-sex and misogynist strand of Christian thought and its disastrous version of the Eden story is in my book Dancing in God’s Earthquake: The Coming Transformation of Religion (Orbis Books, 2020).]

I was taught, as an historian and again as a rabbi, always to be clear what in my own life was pointing me in one or another direction, to allow others a chance to weigh my thoughts in light of that framework – rather than pretending I can be “neutral” about any serious issue.

My brother Howard, alav hashalom, and I were adults and Roe v. Wade had been decided before my mother’s mother told us the circumstances of my father’s mother’s death — Eva Cowan Waskow, may her name be remembered along with the names of many thousands of women and others of unconventional sexuality or gender,whose names have been buried with them, who were victims of male supremacy and especially of an anti-woman theology that I want to address in this essay.

Having birthed five sons and begun rearing them, my grandmother Eva became pregnant again. Evidently feeling it impossible to raise a sixth child (we don’t know exactly what her thoughts and feelings were), she found someone willing to do an illegal abortion. A botched abortion. She died as a result. Her death sent my father to an orphanage for years, and cast a shadow over his life.

[This photograph of Eva Cowan Waskow’s grave was taken by my son, David Waskow, her great-grandson, on a pilgrimage to her grave in Washington DC]

By the time I learned this, not only had Roe v. Wade greatly lessened the stigma of abortion, but I had learned enough Jewish tradition to know that the Torah taught that an abortion, even if against the mother’s will, could result in civil damages at the discretion of a court, but was certainly not murder.

Only once the fetus had been born, its head had appeared outside the mother and it could take a breath on its own, was it deemed a human life. And if the fetus was a threat to the mother’s life (and some rule, her psychological health), it is not merely permissible but obligatory to kill the fetus to save the woman. That is exactly the opposite of official Catholic law.

And then I learned that one of my crucial rabbinic teachers, Rabbi Max Ticktin, before Roe v. Wade had been part of a secret network of “the Janes” who had arranged for illegal but safe abortions by qualified doctors. For years he could not enter the State of Michigan because of a warrant for his arrest.

And then I learned that another of my major teachers, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, knew that his mother had arranged an abortion in order to make it possible for the family to flee Vienna when Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss in 1938. Reb Zalman said the abortion had “given new birth, new life to the whole family.”

So everything in my own family history and the history of my teachers accorded with Jewish law that understood Torah put the life and welfare of women higher than that of an unborn fetus. Yet the Roman Catholic Church and the Evangelical Christian movement, in both of which men make the decisions, ignored the clear biblical text (Exodus 21: 22-25) to come up with their description of abortion as murder.

In fact, these two religious groupings have been able to organize enough political support from organizations that support other forms of subjugation (against Black and Latinx voters, GLBTQ communities, Muslims, immigrants, and Earth itself) that the State of Texas has now legislated a system that turns everyone (not only Texas residents) into a potential paid informant like the Stasi network in Communist East Germany to imprison doctors and all others who assist in any way for an abortion later than about the sixth week of pregnancy? The Supreme Court, without a hearing or internal discussion, has three times refused to prevent the law from taking effect.

Why and how have these large religious bodies been able to mobilize such political power, and what should the rest of us – including many of their own members who disagree — do about it?

First of all, let’s be clear: Abortion is not the only issue, though the US press often reduces the public issue to abortion. The Conference of Catholic Bishops makes clear that what is at stake is much larger: “Shortly after Mr. Biden’s election in November, Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, announced the unusual creation of a working group to address conflicts that could arise between his administration’s policies and church teaching,” the NYtimes reported.

“On Inauguration Day, Archbishop Gomez issued a statement criticizing Mr. Biden for policies “that would advance moral evils” especially “in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender” (emphasis mine).

So what is really at stake is a theology of sex, especially impressed on Christianity by the sex-obsessed Augustine of Hippo (I will not call him a saint) who died in the year 430 CE. What is this sin?

Augustine powerfully affected many leaders of the Christianity of his time. They must have shared much of his tightened strum of sexual tension. Ever since, Christian thought –at least until the Protestant rebellion, and even in some Protestant churches –- has suggested that the mistake of Eden was sexual.

According to this sexual hysteria, the sin has entered into all future humans because Adam and Eve passed it to their children through intercourse and procreation – like a permanent genetic defect carried not in the genes but by the very act of passing on the genes. Since then, most Christian dogma has seen pleasure in the sexual act as not only the bearer of Adam’s sin but the nature of the sin itself.

In this theology, Augustine’s “original” sin was original not only because it was the first, but because it was intimately involved in the origin of the human species and in the origin of every human being. It was and is indelibly imprinted in the human condition. It was and is the “sin of all,” of the entire world. Since sex was necessary to keep the species alive, the dogma became that sex was acceptable if it led to procreation (though not as holy as “chastity” — that is, abstention from sex.). So abortion, contraception, homosexuality, masturbation – all became sins. Hence Archbishop Gomez’ warning. It is especially interesting that this malinterpretation of the Eden story names the sin was Sex. Not the adolescent mistake of growing one’s own identity by disobeying the parent. Not the Greed of wishing to gobble up the whole world. not leave even one Tree unsujugated.

Through the centuries, some Christian thought – today, a great deal of Christian thought — and most Jewish thought, has refused to believe that the sin of Eden (whatever it was), made sex or sexual desire or sexual pleasure in itself sinful, or that the mistake of Adam and Eve delivered that sin into all human souls and bodies.

My own understanding of the sin of Eden comes partly from the deep imprint still on me of 1968, of seeing Pharaoh in our own generation, and of the joyful alternative if we could only cross the Red Sea into the Promised Land, the milk-and-honey Garden. I am haunted by the Bomb and the Climate Crisis, and at the same time inspired by the vision of an ecologically delightful planet. And that brings me to look at the birth of humankind, and at this powerful mythic parable of our beginning.

What should we do? We need to organize.

1. Right away, in honor and emulation of Rabbi Ticktin and the other “Janes,” we should be organizing networks for “illegal” distribution of safe chemical means of inducing abortion, led by rabbis and other spiritual leaders, and prepare to support them financially, legally, and with nonviolent civil disobedience if the State of Texas (and other states that are exploring the same system) and its informers attack them.

2. In every synagogue and every church and religious order and department of theology where spiritual leaders teach, the Augustinian theology against sex and for the subordination of women should be stripped of its legitimacy and denounced for its destructive effects.

3. We need to lift up a theology of the Song of Songs as a vision of Eden for a grown-up humankind, not allegorized as meaning only love between God and the Jewish people or between Christ and the Church, but infusing love for God into love between human beings of all genders and sexualities, and of love between human earthlings and Earth.

We are not used to mobilizing against the theology of any other tradition. Liberal and progressive religious traditions have customarily appealed to their own values and let others go their own way. But this is different. We are facing an attempt to impose a reactionary, retrogressive theology upon the whole American people, We need to name and oppose the pernicious anti-sex, anti-woman theology that distorts the Bible and perverts human society. This effort to impose an anti-woman, anti-sex theology is a national danger.

We need to say that the real dangers to the human species are not women, not sex as a joyful union of Body and Spirit, but the H-Bomb, the burning of fossil fuels, the over-population that takes over all living-space for humankind and crowds other species to extinction. The obsession with subjugating women and punishing joyful, consensual sex distracts us from facing the powerful forces — I call them the Corporate Carbon Pharaohs — that are threatening Earth and Humanity. Bring more than Ten Plagues upon all Earth, out of Greed for still more money. That GREED is the real sin aginst the Holy Spirritt, the Interbreathing of animals and vegetation, of Oxyygen and CO2, that keeps all life alive. The build-up of far too much CO2 is choking Earth, choking Humankind.

It is important to note that despite the urgency of Pope Francis to speak against the Greed so dangerous it is destroying the web of life on Earth, the obsession of the American Catholic bishops with sexual sin plays into the hands of the Corporate Carbon Pharaohs whose addiction to the sin of Greed is forcing plagues upon all life-forms. It is also important to note that this theology oppresses not only women but those of “unconventional” sexualities and genders. Even forbidding abortion may affect trans men who continue to have a uterus.

We need to look at the biblical passage that says, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill up the Earth, and subdue it,” and say ”DONE! Now what?”

And for me, the Song of Songs is the “now what.” It is feminist, pro-sex, pro-love. pro-Earth, and ecological in its worldview, not hierarchical. It imagines Eden for a grown-up human race. It is heart and fountain of a Torah for the next epoch of Earth’s history.

I wrote this essay last September. If you shrugged it off then, perhaps you feel different today. It is time to take seriously an attempt to impose an anti-love, anti-life theology, on America. And stop it.

Shalom, salaam, peace, paz, mir, namaste — Arthur

Sunday, November 21, 2021 ECSM 
Decolonizing Thanksgiving Service

If you are like me, when we think of Thanksgiving we are whisked back to our days of elementary education, to coloring pages of turkeys and telling the stories of the Pilgrims eating a wonderful meal with the Native Americans. This was the time for school assemblies, complete with paper costumes and songs of our thankfulness to be Americans. 

We have a national story about Thanksgiving just like we have a story of the Fourth of July. A people need a narrative to be a people and a nation needs a common story to become united as a nation. Stories define us. They shape who we are and they give form to our common experiences. 

Thanksgiving has its roots in the harvest festivals of ancient agricultural societies, and like the 4th cof July, Thanksgiving has become more of a patriotic celebration. Perhaps this is because we are unable to make a connection to what constitutes a good harvest, especially when we live in a world where fresh bounty can be shipped to us year-round and picked-up easily at the local supermarket. We as a people have become disconnected from our world and with what it takes to bring food to market, let alone to our tables. 

The narrative associated with Thanksgiving is the landing of the Pilgrims in New England. It is significant that the Pilgrims themselves turned to one of those other ancient stories – the story of the Exodus – to interpret what happened to them. We should remember that the Pilgrims, saw Europe as Egypt. They considered the Atlantic as the Red Sea and these ancestors viewed these shores as their Promised Land. 

Perhaps it was by interpreting their experience in light of the Exodus story that enabled them to face the hardships of those beginning years. They were sure that God had guided them from bondage to freedom and that they could endure suffering, because they believed that through it they would be led to freedom and a better life. 

Just as significantly, we need to remember that when the only non- voluntary immigrants to this country – the African-Americans – sought to make sense of their experience of slavery, they used the same biblical story, the Exodus, and interpreted it for their situation. 

For those stolen from African and enslaved by white settlers here – Egypt was where they were, here in America – and the Promised Land was freedom while they were here, or a return to their homeland. The songs that they created that have become a permanent part of American culture and many of our hymnals – and they are replete with the images of the Exodus. 

Today, let’s also remember our Liberian friends among us here in Contra Costa County. These siblings of ours, whose ancestors were once enslaved in America, then returned to Africa only to be displaced as refugees by the conflicts in Liberia – these sisters and brothers are a testament to that cry for freedom present within every human soul. 

But there is one other group that we usually leave out of our American narratives, or at least we tell their story differently than they do. The Rev. Robert Two Bulls of the Oglala Lakota people is an Episcopal priest in Los Angeles who experiences Thanksgiving this way. He says, 

“Every year when Thanksgiving Day approaches I feel without fail a growing consternation inside me. I attribute this feeling to the inevitable emergence of the whitewashed historical record of this day and to the sudden attention that America directs toward the Native American Indians. It is an awareness that wakes up every year after Halloween and then will go back to sleep when the last scrap of turkey is devoured.” 

Yes, the American version of Thanksgiving to Robert Two Bulls and other Native-Americans is starkly different. It goes something like this: 

“God had given this land to European people. They came to these shores primarily for economic reasons. And through the next few hundred years America was born as a country and the Indian faded away. All is well.” 

But the narrative most Americans know – says, 

“The Pilgrims came here mainly for religious freedom reasons. After the settling and founding of a new colony they gave thanks to God for providing a great bounty.” 

This is a hard word for people like you and me from the Congregational and Presbyterian histories in this country, isn’t it? 

The truth of our Thanksgiving story is a complicated one about which much has been written, but there are facts that need to be considered and remembered by us as people of faith before we begin to celebrate this holiday. 

When the Pilgrims touched Plymouth Rock in 1620 and made it to shore, they found a deserted village which they eventually appropriated for themselves and named Plymouth Colony. That village had been named Patuxet and was the formal home of the people who were a branch of the Wampanoags. The majority of these people had died from smallpox in 1618. But two years later their village was a ghost town.

Those early Pilgrims who arrived were poor and hungry, unprepared for life in this new land. By the time they were found by a Native-American named Squanto, a former inhabitant of Patuxet, half of the Pilgrims had died. Fortunately for the Pilgrims, Squanto spoke English. But what we usually don’t hear is that Squanto had learned this language over a period of several years following his capture by English traders and being sold into slavery in Europe. 

According to Historian David Silverman in the Atlantic Magazine, “In 1614, Captain Thomas Hunt had anchored his ship in the harbor of the Wampanoag community of Patuxet—the very site where the colony of Plymouth would be founded six years later—and invited curious members of the tribe onboard. Though meetings between European explorers and Native Americans tended to degenerate into bloodshed, the lure of trade was too enticing for either party to resist. Europeans sought furs, particularly beaver pelts, to sell back home. The Wampanoags wanted to pick through the strangers’ merchandise of metal tools, jewelry, and cloth. And so a number of them—including a man named Tisquantum, or Squanto for short—went aboard Hunt’s vessel.

Hunt double-crossed them, seizing 20 of their men, then stuffing them below decks. Soon seven other Wampanoags farther east at Nauset fell into the same trap, joining their tribesmen on a horrific oceanic journey toward an unimaginable destiny. It would have come as cold comfort when they discovered Hunt’s actual plan to sell them as enslaved people in Málaga, Spain, alongside his catch of fish. That is the last we hear of most of these unfortunate souls, who disappeared into Iberia’s mass of bound laborers drawn from around the globe.

Tisquantum very nearly shared this end but for two strokes of fortune. First, a group of friars blocked his sale, doubtlessly citing a routinely ignored Spanish law that Native Americans should not be enslaved. Then, after an uncertain period of time, Tisquantum made contact with one of Málaga’s many English merchants who, in turn, took him to London.

Finally, in 1618, Tisquantum got his chance to return to his native land. He was introduced to Captain Thomas Dermer, who, back in 1614, had been part of the very exploring and fishing expedition that had kidnapped Tisquantum. By this point, Tisquantum had learned enough English to offer his services to Dermer in exchange for passage home. As it turned out, Dermer was just the right person for such an overture. Dermer’s employer, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, was a prime mover of English colonization schemes and, as such, a collector of captive Native Americans who could serve as cultural brokers.”

Squanto had eventually made it back home in a heroic nine-year journey only to find his people pretty much wiped out by disease and a new people living in his old village.  They say as much as 75% of the Wampanoag Confederation were wiped out. 

One Indigenous writer says it this way:  “Into this disaster bumbled the Pilgrims. They showed up in New England a few weeks before winter and promptly began starving. Up until the Pilgrims, the pattern had been pretty clear. Europeans would visit the Wampanoags who would be interested in their trade goods, but were really uninterested in letting Europeans permanently occupy the land. Often, armed native people would force Europeans to leave if they attempted to stay too long. This time, the Europeans wanted to stay, and the disease that had decimated Patuxet ensured that they had a place to settle.” ^[i]

After teaching the Pilgrims basic survival and agricultural techniques, the Wamponoags and Pilgrims kept peaceful relations for well over fifty years. But some historians believe that Squanto was eventually killed by one the Puritans, after Chief Massassoit considered him a threat to the Indigenous people, after he was accused of a coup attempt.  By the second winter, the Settler’s situation was secure enough they held a feast of Thanksgiving, where Chief Massassoit showed up with with about 90 men, most of them armed.  After the Pilgrim militia responded by marching around firing their guns, both sides sat down, at a lot of food and complained about their neighbors, the Narragansetts down in what is today Rhode Island.  Most if not all Wampanoags now consider the arrival of Europeans as a tragedy – not something to be grateful about – as this brought about the genocide and then cultural genocide of their ancestors.  

Perhaps today, perhaps this week, we as a nation need to celebrate the life of Squanto, who was the real hero of this sad story.  In an interesting way, it was Squanto – as both former slave and aid to the Pilgrims – who merges both of our American narratives into one.  Squanto was the one who reached across the Interfaith and inter-cultural breach.  The Pilgrims probably wouldn’t have survived that first winter without him, but it also set up a relationship of conflict with the other Natives.  

And so, perhaps Thanksgiving isn’t a celebration created to play into our notion of greatness. We as Americans have to remember that land in America was largely acquired dishonestly by outright theft and by the breaking of treaties with the first peoples of this land. We also need to ask the question, 

“Did God really send the diseases of Europe to annihilate all the indigenous inhabitants and then give the land to the Europeans?” 

Only three years after arrival, in 1623, Mather the elder, one of those Pilgrim leaders was recorded as giving thanks to his God for destroying the heathen savages to make way for what he called, “a better growth.” 

Perhaps we need to question all of these narratives, in the Bible or elsewhere, that link the stories of Exodus of the liberation of one people to the annihilation of another people. 

For with the biblical Exodus also comes the eradication of the Canaanites, and the Jebusites, and the Hittites, and the Moabites, and the Ammonites. And the current war there in the Holy Land continues to be a conflict for land and resources, that affects each of our communities. 

Again, from the Atlantic: 

“Like Pocahontas and Sacagawea, two of the other famous Indians in American lore, Massassoit’s people helped the colonizers and then moved offstage.

Atlantic Article – In 1621, the Wampanoag Tribe Had Its Own Agenda

Contrary to the Thanksgiving myth, though, friendliness does not account for the alliance the Wampanoag tribe made with the nascent Plymouth settlement. The Wampanoags had an internal politics all their own; its dynamics had been shaped by many years of tense interaction with Europeans, and by deadly plagues that ravaged the tribe’s home region as the pace of English exploration accelerated. Chief Massassoit—whom historians today generally refer to as the sachem Ousamequin—faced stiff opposition from his own people as he tried to manage the English newcomers and looked for ways to survive the forces of colonization already tearing at the Wampanoags.”

The article continues to tell the story of how Captain Dermer, who returned Squanto back home in hopes of greater trade, eventually was entrapped and massacred by Chief Massassoit and another formerly enslaved Indigenous Wampanoag named Epenow, who had escaped the same kind of slavery Squanto was trapped in.  Squano had tried to warn Captain Dermer that it could be a trap, and barely escaped with his life.  Just a few months later, the Mayflower appeared off Cape Cod.  The real story of Thanksgiving has attempted to do away with the portions about White Settlers colonialism and preceding rounds of how European Slavery was first making Indigenous Americans their victims.  

Friends, what Thanksgiving reminds us of is that the land – and the produce of the land ultimately belongs to God, just as it says in Psalm 24.  And that the sharing of the produce of the land, like that done by Squanto and others, is what calls us to this moment.  It is in the sharing of this Holiday that we are reminded that we belong to each other.  So, how do we tell this story as modern Anti-racist Americans?

Real story of thanksgiving: We don’t have to pretend that the Pilgrims and Wampanoags were peaceful.  Their relationships were fraught with tension, because both of their survivals were at stake.  And, while they may have had a peaceful meal a few times, eventually their relationship returned to Colonizer and Colonized, especially after more rounds of illness further weakened the tribes, and more European Settlers followed the Pilgrims.  Even more conflict arose as their children kept moving onto Indigenous lands.. 

Jesus of Nazareth once said, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life…” 

While different Americans may experience Thanksgiving differently – 

• •          as Pilgrims escaping religious intolerance, 
• •          as slaves escaping bondage, 
• •          as the oppressed escaping poverty, 
• •          as victims escaping persecution, 
• •          as refugees escaping the ravages of war – 

we all have in our past a version of the same story. And if it is not our personal story, it is our ancestors’ story. And even if it is not our ancestor’s story, then it is the story of our friends and loved ones. 

That is why our faith community are so important. Not so we can have great gatherings like this where we can pat each other on the back.  We come together as often as we can because our narratives run through – and run into – each other’s. Sometimes the relations we share are life giving, and bolster our common humanity. But sometimes we need to be able to tell each other our truths and be changed in the interaction. 

We can remember the past, and not use the title of this holiday in the presence of Native Americans – now knowing how hurtful it is for many people.  Perhaps we could change up our menu on that day, including an Indigenous dish from your region or from a regional First Nation. 

8 Ways to Decolonize and Honor Native Peoples on Thanksgiving

         1. Learn the Real History

         2. Decolonize Your Dinner

         3. Listen to Indigenous Voices

         4. #StandwithMashpee, the Wampanoag Tribe in Mass.

         5. Celebrate Native People

         6. Buy Native This Holiday

         7. Share Positive Representations of Native People

         8. End Racist Native Mascots in Sports 

From https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/8-ways-decolonize-and-honor-native-peoples-thanksgiving

Give to funds like this one:  Supporting the United American Indians of New England’s National Day of Mourning – found at http://www.uaine.org

Questions you could discuss as you share what you are thankful for around your table on Thursday:

• • How have I benefited from settler-colonialism and the displacement of Indigenous peoples?​

• • Am I actively incorporating Indigenous Justice into my work and life?​

• • What is my intention in honoring Indigenous peoples when offering a land acknowledgment? ​

• • What do I know about local Indigenous peoples today?  What would #LandBack look like?

Remember the Goodness of God: You don’t need a national holiday to create your own Holy Day!  You can take a day off any time you really need to.  You could make any day a day of Giving Thanks, if you think about it!  You can even make turkey and stuffing for dinner any day you wish, if you want.  Take a day and go to the beach!  Take your family out to dinner.  Go hiking and count your blessings, thanking God for all of the goodness in your life!

Last two quotes to take us home…

“Thankfulness Breathes through the rusted cracks in our soul and reminds us why we have a soul in the first place.”

Slow down, breathe, take a break!  –  And, remember….

“You were blessed to be a blessing!”

This is how we add to our Anti-Racism work as Presbyterians and UCCers. 

May we ever be thankful, truly thankful, and may we ever be hungry for justice. Real, genuine distributive, social, transformative justice – and a theological  understanding broad enough to see such justice come – in this world and the next. Amen. 

---

^[i]  The True Story of Thanksgiving: https://voxpopulisphere.com/2015/11/26/the-true-thanksgiving-story/

If you want to see it with the images in the sermon, please visit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R-oDmW9AZI&t=1s

Black Lives Matter: Understanding the call to Defund the Police and the Intersectionality of Ending the War on All Black People, Criminal Justice Reform, and Reparations. 

Tuesday, August 11^th, 2020

It is well past time for all Americans to call on all of our elected leaders to take seriously the national call to end police brutality and systemic racism targeted against the Black community and other communities of color.

After so many examples of wrongful deaths at the hands of the very public servants who should be protecting them, I call on every municipality, county and state official to create a multi-pronged process to address systemic racism within its jurisdictions.  I agree with the Movement For Black Lives, and ask our elected leaders to hear them, fully (in their own words from https://m4bl.org/defund-the-police/).

“The time has come to defund the police, messaging to #defundpolice to redefine public safety and accountability for the 21^st century and beyond.  In response to a legacy of police and proxy violence that most recently took the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade, people have taken to the streets in protest. This uprising against excessive, brutal, and militarized policing has called for decision makers in city, state, and federal government to defund the police after decades of inaction and failed reforms, consent decrees, investigations, and oversight.

“For much of U.S. history, law enforcement meant implementing laws that were explicitly designed to subjugate Black people and enforce white supremacy. That’s why Black people, along with hundreds of thousands of others, are calling for city, state, and federal governments to abolish policing as we currently understand it. We must divest from excessive, brutal, and discriminatory policing and invest in a vision of community safety that works for everyone, not just an elite few. 

“We know the safest communities in America are places that don’t center the police. What we’re looking for already exists, and we already know it works. We need look no further than neighborhoods where the wealthy, well-connected, and well-off live, or anywhere there is easy access to living wages, healthcare, quality public education and freedom from police terror.

“We can’t stand by while our city, state, and federal governments continue to fund an excessive, brutal, and discriminatory system of policing. We will no longer be told that what we deserve is not politically viable or logistically possible. We will no longer be deprived of what others have long enjoyed in this country: basic rights, safety, and freedom.

“When we talk about defunding the police, we’re talking about making a major pivot in national priorities. We need to see a shift from massive spending on police that don’t keep us safe to a massive investment in a shared vision of community safety that actually works. We know this won’t happen overnight. We’re tired of quick fixes and piecemeal reforms. Ending police violence will require a thoughtful, deliberate, and participatory approach that has already begun.

“The exploding COVID-19 pandemic and disparate impacts on our Black community have shown us what happens when the government underfunds public health while overfunding police and military budgets. It’s clear that millions of people now know what Black communities have long understood: We must reverse centuries of disinvestment in Black communities to invest in a future where we can all be connected, represented, and free.”  (https://m4bl.org/defund-the-police/)

I join others in centering the needs of the Black community, especially when it comes to the right to live in basic safety and without fear from police or others.  This is not about us, but finally about encouraging our elected leaders to hear the very real cries of life and death from them.  I also won’t attempt to rob Black people of their power by insisting they water down the term “defund,” which should not be understood as saying “unfund,” which is the way some people are reading the word.  (In many ways, insisting that they change their terminology is a bit like demanding that “all lives matter.”)  I realize that the term “defund the police” can be a non-starter for many, but I join those who ask you to listen to the calls by the Black community itself.  Please read the quote above again. 

The time has come for our elected leaders to address, irreversibly, the valid complaints of those who feel targeted because of the implicit bias and systemic racism that is endemic throughout our culture.  Please study the history of policing, and its origins in America influenced so heavily by the history of militias to suppress slave rebellions, or private policing paid primarily to protect the property of the wealthy.

We need all of our elected leaders to make a difference this time around.  The Black community has been suffering for over 400 years, and every round of “reconstruction” has failed to bring about true equality for them.  We as a country must not fail this time.  That means that policing as we know it must change.  We must envision public safety in different ways.  All people must be able to trust our public servants, and if that means a shifting of funding for those functions that can be accomplished by social workers or public servants without guns, then I encourage all municipalities to study best how to make such changes.

I also call your attention to the other areas of the Movement For Black Lives platform (available at https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/), which calls for an end to the war on Black youth, Black communities, Black women, on Black Trans, gender nonconforming and Intersex people, on Black health and Black disabled people, on Black immigrants.

The institutionalized racism in our “criminal justice system” must also end.  The M4BL also call for the end of all jails, prisons and immigration detention (https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/end-jails-prisons-detention/), the death penalty, the war on drugs, the surveillance of Black communities and pretrial detention and money bail (https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/end-pretrial-and-money-bail/).  Also important is the call to end the militarization of law enforcement (https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/the-demilitarization-of-law-enforcement/), especially with the history of Urban Shield here in the Bay Area.  Ending of the use of past criminal history is also important, since this traps people in the system (https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/end-use-of-criminal-history/). There is a level of specificity and details to the demands that includes which federal legislation is being discussed.  Reparations for past and continuing harms by the state is also something our California Legislature is taking up (https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2020/06/13/california-assembly-passes-reparations-bill/ – 786ff0363aa6), and the Movement for Black Lives has a Reparations page and tool kit at https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/reparations/.

If a community cannot guarantee that the full Bill of Rights of every citizen will be protected by all of its employees serving those citizens, it has a duty to make sure that the systems under its control are reformed or replaced with new structures that can guarantee every human the full ability to flourish in “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

 

Black Lives are Sacred

Black Lives are Sacred.

Black Lives don’t only Matter.  That’s not enough.

When Black people say Black Lives Matter, they are saying “Stop killing us!”  They are saying that it is the minimum they should expect as fellow citizens.

And before you try to insert the phrase “Don’t all lives matter,” into the conversation, we all know that.  And you know that the phrase is most often used to defer the conversation, which against decenters the Black people who are being killed today.  Please admit that all lives won’t really matter until Black Lives Matter, until we have centered the needs of those who have been systematically left out of the American dream.

The last week has shown that more clearly than we’ve ever seen.  With multiple people getting killed by the police all over the country, we should have expected the protests.  We could have expected much more than that.  Instead, the police continued to do violence against Black people standing up for their rights as they protested police brutality.

So let’s start over.  Today, I am asking you to take a step beyond Black Lives Matter.  I am inviting you to view all Black Lives as Sacred as your own.  Let’s take a look at what our faith traditions says to us.

Black Lives are created in the image and likeness of God – as the Jewish texts and Rabbis remind us, all humans were created for relationship with the divine, with ethical, intellectual and compassionate abilities.

Black Lives are an expression of the divine – imago Dei as the Catholics like to say, with some of the same capacities as God of sharing love, mercy, justice and caring for “the least of these.”

Black Lives are also precious in God’s sight – as the Evangelicals like to sing.  Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight…

Black Lives are created by the same God as everyone else – despite what those white, slave owning Christians said, we are all members of the same human race.  Today we can look back at that terrible theology, and condemn all ideologies that oppress anyone as heretical forms of idolatry.  This includes all of the intersections of race, including: gender identity, gender expression, class, sexual orientation, and so much more.  But will that stop the police violence?  More is needed.

It’s also important for us remember that Black Lives are valued – they love their fathers, mothers, siblings and friends as much as you do yours.  Sometimes that love for them is grieved because of the violent actions of others, but each and every one of them are valued by God as the blessing to the world that they were created to be.

Black Lives are brilliant – African- American intellectuals excel in every field of inquiry and social science.  They invented many of the things we use everyday.  Beyond excelling in every field, they are also the originators of many technologies that were stolen from them and repackaged as white created endeavors.  Much of what we call Greek philosophy and science originated in Egypt.  More importantly, their social critique of the way their community has been treated needs to be accepted as truth rather than ignored or resisted.

Black Lives are resilient – what other people group do you know that has survived millennia of theft, cultural genocide, ethnic cleansing, chattel slavery, slave patrols, their children and spouses being stolen, the Civil War, the Jim Crow South, the lynchings, police brutality, being underpaid for the same work, being used in medical experiments without their knowledge, being stuck in manual labor, never being promoted, you can fill in the blank….

Black Lives are protectors – creatively resisting oppression in all its forms.  Black Lives call for the transformation of our systems of policing, which has proven itself intent on putting property over people.  Instead, they call for the reinvestment in black communities, many of which still don’t have clean water, clean air or viable economies.  I join my voice with those others that demand a defunding of the police in order to create new ways of ensuring public safety with services for all of those in need, whether that be services for those living without shelter, those living with mental illness or addiction, and even trauma informed, non-violent ways of deescalating conflicts.

Black Lives are colonized – even after the colonization of slavery, Black Lives are still at risk through systemic racism written into our employment, housing, civic and state codes.  Poverty is always a policy decision.  Enforcement of laws are always dependent on the implicit bias of the police or district attorneys. Systemic and institutionalized racism in all its forms must end.  COVID-19 has exposed the health inequities that the poor, the disabled and people color have put up with for years.  We need a viable health system for all Americans regardless of their employment status.

Black Lives are artists – our culture has a long history of appropriating Black culture, music, art and poetry.  We remember the history of some people who love to watch African-Americans sing and dance, and then claim their art forms as their own – without attribution or the sharing of profits.  African-Americans continue to lead in the arts, even using them as a form of resistance against the discrimination and violence they experience.

Black Lives are survivors – despite a history of repression, Black people have supported each other throughout history.  They have stood up to police dogs, fire hoses, police lines, lunch counters, unfair jailing and a “criminal justice system” that is purposely stacked against them.  Read the book Just Mercy to see how entrenched white supremacy is in our courts and prisons.  Remember that some states have ended the death penalty because they have admitted that the system is rife with corruption and blatant racism.

Black Lives are human – all Homo Sapiens came out of Africa black.  Africa remains the most genetically diverse continent in the world.  We are all related to each other.  Our best science reminds us that we are one family.

Black Lives are intrinsically diverse – as with all groups people, there is a spectrum of thought, beliefs, religious expressions and life philosophies.  Likewise, there are a variety of expressions of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, political philosophies and economic philosophies expressed in the community.  Despite the common experience of discrimination, over generalizations about the community abound as a form control or making excuses for the present conditions that they live within.

Black Lives are a rainbow of colors – expressing the greatest diversity of the human family, and there remains an implicit bias against darker skin in our nation, as there is in the greater society.  We must eject all cultural messages around beauty or personal value that demeans those with darker skin tones in favor of finding beauty only in lighter skinned people.  God created the whole diversity and values all people as having intrinsic worth and beauty.

Black Lives are beautiful – as the Black Power Movement taught us.  Isn’t it sad that our culture has had to remind people of this to counter the projection and socialization of white supremacists?

Ultimately, Black Lives are sacred, whole and needed.  Our culture needs to step back and take in the lessons the African-American community has to teach us.  We need to celebrate all Black Lives for the mirror they hold up to us as a society.  And, we need to celebrate that sacredness – this holiness – that they express in the many loves and lives that they hold dear.  And, we must reject any offer of a white savior to know this and experience this.

Black Lives have been more patient with white America’s violence longer than any of us realize.  But no more.  The message I take away from the last few weeks is that it is well past time for America to wake up and reject the lies being told us to keep us from working together.

The Movement For Black Lives (M4BL) is working to help us all see Black Lives.  They aren’t asking for special rights.  They are demanding equality and the end to the systematic colonization of their very lives.

If you aren’t ok with that, it’s your problem to work through.  The rest of us are moving on and we won’t be playing your games any longer.  We are taking your power away.  But, if you want to join us – you are more than welcome.  This will mean doing your own work, exposing your own implicit bias, and working against the systemic racism that is so embedded in our nation and culture.

As we join our hearts, minds and prayers for the grief and pain of our country these days, we remember the lives of Ahmed Aubrey, Breanna Taylor and George Floyd, we also remember the thousands of people who have died at the hands of police departments that should have been their protectors.

And let us begin right here in Contra Costa County, which marked the one year anniversary of the murder of Miles Hall at the hands of the Walnut Creek Police, on June 2^nd, 2019.  Miles was a young African-American man who experienced mental illness.  He was killed by the police despite the fact that his mother had informed the police that Miles was having a mental illness episode, and we continue to call on Police Department to be truthful in their deliberations with the family, to be transparent enough to change their policies and institute repercussions for the officers involved, and brave enough to admit that there is no excuse for their actions.

We also lift up Joseph Malott, another young black man from Walnut Creek, who was assaulted by the police, and then attacked by police dogs, hit with rubber bullets and tear gassed.  He’s being charged with attempted murder for tossing a tear gas canister back towards the police who threw it at him.  Why is it attempted murder and endangerment when a peaceful protester sends the tools of police brutality back to their source?  Why are they using tear gas at all, after it was included in the Geneva Conventions as illegal to use in wartime?  Why did the police shoot anyone, like the peaceful young woman who was shot in the head with rubber bullets that had to spend days in the hospital?  This isn’t an expression of public safety, but public terror brought about by people paid with our own taxes.

Let’s move beyond meaningless, diversionary conversations towards the genuine substance at hand and how our actions can recreate our world.  Real actions will include changes to our school books, our public policies, and all of those things that tell our culture that it’s ok to do violence against Black people.  And then, when our actions have surpassed the weak public pronouncements of our politicians – and have won the day – perhaps we will be ready, because we will have learned how to be equal.  So, let each of us use whatever level of privilege our culture gives us in the service of others.  Let us remind our friends and neighbors that we can change the policies that have beset Black people for so long.

As we grieve together, and as we hope and pray and dream of a new America, let us also work for that new day.  Let us reclaim our own sacredness and wholeness – as we help reclaim the sacredness of all Black people.  Amen.

I awoke this morning to find our President attempting to further his own system of distraction.  He does this every time he doesn’t want us to be thinking of what a horrible job he’s done, or to divert us away from the inequality policy creep of his administration.

It’s a typical tactic of authoritarian leaders.  It’s meant to keep us chasing after the latest tweet, attempting to protect what little systems of checks and balances we have, and a blatant attempt to make us live within his worldview. He wouldn’t keep doing it if wasn’t working for him, so we have to think carefully how we wish to respond rather than react to these messages.

So, taking a deep breath, let’s remember the truth about our moment – especially as it’s the church herself being described with the latest foray of gaslighting.  Let’s also remember that Trump usually makes no distinction which part of the church he is talking about, even though this time he was a bit more inclusive by including synagogues and mosques in his new policy he’s willing to go to war with State Governors over.

Faith communities are essential to American life.  But one of the great lessons faith communities have learned during the pandemic is that we are not our buildings, but we are the people who meet together, pray together, serve together and cry together.

Our faith communities are more diverse than the few our President referred to, meaning that Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Baha’ís, Pagans and others are also vital parts of the faith community, whose service and public contributions to society should be recognized as vital to a pluralistic society.  Instead, as we’ve seen in the past, this administration seems to lump all faith groups together with White Evangelicalism, and what’s good for them must be good for the others (which sounds increasingly like they are just Conservative Christianity Lite).  When he does this, he deepens a false sense of persecution that the Religious Right has convinced themselves of.

Progressive Christians, Reform and Conservative Judaism, Progressive Muslims and others who do not agree with the culture wars of the Religious Right are often included in this gross over generalization, as if our concerns are the same as theirs.  He doesn’t really pay enough attention to us to know how we view the word differently.  But we can tell he lumps us all together when he says things like “all Jews should love me for what I’ve done for Israel” or “all churches are essential.”  He thinks such statements and policies will get the faith community to support all his policies, regardless of how divergent they are from our real and proclaimed values.  He even thinks he is being magnanimous on our behalf when he preemptively picks a fight with State Governors, many of whom are not following the federal guidelines or their own state guidelines by re-opening before 14 days of steady decrease of the virus.  Now he thinks he can pretend to be our champion against bad governors who wont do what he tells them to do.

This is a form of dividing and conquering that seeks to win us all over to his positions.  It expands the culture wars of the past between Left and Right, towards a new world where we are with him or against him.  No room for nuance.  No room for recognizing that people of good conscience come to differing conclusions about the needs in society, or that we can be a country where e pluribus unim – out of many, one – can actually work once again.

So, we’ve all experienced how divisive the rhetoric, stances, lies and tweets our President delivers daily.  But have we recognized that this isn’t just a mistaken tactic that he uses.  Have we admitted that he does this on purpose, to bring about his policy agenda, and to keep the spotlight on himself.  Have we admitted to ourselves that this is also a part of the Dictators Playbook?

Timothy Snyder, PhD, wrote a small book called “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” (2017, Tim Duggan Books).  In this short, small 126 page booklet, he points out that the “founding fathers” wrote into our system of government checks and balances to thwart those that wished to bring tyranny to these shores.  Looking back at the history of the 20th century, he looks for what actions would have been able to ward off the rise of Fascism and Totalitarian Communism.  He points out “twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to the circumstances of today.”  Here’s the list, without his explication and explanations on why these actions are necessary in times like these:

1. Do not obey in advance
2. Defend institutions
3. Beware the one-party state
4. Take responsibility for the face of the world
5. Remember professional ethics
6. Be wary of paramilitaries
7. Be reflective in you must be armed
8. Stand out
9. Be kind to our language
10. Believe in truth
11. Investigate
12. Make eye contact and small talk
13. Practice corporeal politics
14. Establish a private life
15. Contribute to good causes
16. Learn from peers in other countries
17. Listen for dangerous words
18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives
19. Be a patriot
20. Be as courageous as you can

Without looking any of them up, what strikes you about this list?  We can all agree that we need to believe in truth, but it gets confusing when so many competing messages are in play.  Some on the list are no brainers.  Most of us seek to treat others with kindness and humanely.  We try to investigate what is fake news before posting on social media, and we attempt to remain ethical in all of the ways that matter.

We’ve seen White Nationalist paramilitaries coming out of the woodwork during this administration, and our President rarely faults their public presence even when violence is used.  We have all watched as multiple institutions have failed us, not just in the last four years but over the last 20 years we have seen a steady decline in the health of our voting system, lack of congressional protections from Wall Street’s excesses, the ability of the peace movement to stop wars from beginning, failure of our government to protect us from natural disasters or pandemics, an inability to enforce an economic regulatory system that would have protected us from the abuses during the foreclosure crisis, a failure to protect us all from mass shootings because of a favored interpretation of our constitution, the starving of our social safety net, an inability to end the black people murdered by police officers everywhere across the country, the utter failure of our mainstream news outlets to do anything but share corporate messages, an inability to have a real conversation about comprehensive immigration reform to protect millions of families living here without documentation, and the utter failure of all of our systems to stave off a fossil fuel industry that has capture all the controls of our government, media and economic powers to keep polluting on a planet dangerously close to the climate tipping points of no return.

The problems are real.  They are all around us.  And it would be easy to retreat into our own cocoons of protection from it all. But, as Snyder reminds us, we need to stay vigilant, keep our sanity, stand up when necessary – but most of all – we need to stay persistent and consistent in our search for truth and goodness.

“Take responsibility for the face of the world. The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.” (page 32)

So let us look at todays announcement through this new lens.  Let us recognize that by calling communities of faith essential in order to attempt to get more people of faith to support him politically in a time of declining popularity, he is showing us that he is willing to endanger the many elderly and the people with health risks that may return to public places.  He is blatantly abusing his oath of office to serve every American.  Furthermore, encouraging a split between blue and red State Governors further attempts this divide and conquer mentality, regardless of the religious and political diversity in each and every state.  In a country whose economic system has made it increasingly hard to stay in the middle class, setting economic policies that keep people overworking in their jobs for access to health care has been exposed during this pandemic.  The poor have always been pitted against each other for the scraps of our trickle down economic idolatry.  Those with some control over their economic lives will make it through this season much more easily that those who are pressured to keep working in genuinely “essential” workplaces to keep our health and public services going for all.  Even well paid members of the health care industry have attempted to get the PPE (personal protective equipment) necessary to do their jobs while this administration competes with states to procure and distribute the PPE to those Governors and municipalities that provide enough deference to the ego of the President.  Trump knows what he is doing in demanding such loyalty like a mob boss.  This is how he has chosen to lead, with threats and systems that further the inequality.  Sadly, he has confused strong leadership with “power-over” politics, which his political movement applauds as “owning the libtards.”  Trump is using the faith community as the wedge issue in his cover up for the lost 6 weeks of lack of response to the pandemic.  He wants us to forget about it, but we do so at all of our peril.

So while we follow Snyder’s invitation to investigate, we must also make sure we are ready to make a real difference for our families and communities should the systems and powers that be turn on the people.  We need to recreate the commons in our own backyards through gardening, local systems of sharing and caring for one another that we had thought we had built into our systems of government.  We can encourage our local leaders to retake the mantle of leadership as the funders of last resort for our failing social safety net, rather than relying on federal block grants.  This means we will have to support our local leaders willing to retake this leadership, and protect them from those who have established an idolatry around taxes as oppression, and call them out.  Why is it that those who are the most averse to taxes and regulations tend to be the affluent?  How can we encourage them to take a new worldview that helps them see that their businesses will have more customers in a world where everyone can earn enough to survive?  How can we help them see that it is in their best interest to help fund a county health system that protects us all from various life threatening diseases in order to help their family decrease their exposure to infections?  We need to find a new way to frame and help gently expose those systems that have so clouded the thinking of many of our neighbors.

So, today I will keep defending institutions like our public health system for all, including Planned Parenthood, because anything less would be obeying in advance the desires of the corporate oligarchy that has been trying to undo the New Deal since it was instituted during another Great Depression.  (Isn’t it ironic that they waited until another greater depression to enact many of their policies that they’ve had waiting in the wings until a time of disaster to implement?)

I will continue to call out the idolatry of the 2nd amendment, and argue against the latest, novel interpretation being used to allow people who are attempting to reclaim their societal privilege by carrying them around in public places.  I’ll speak out about the intersectionalities of race, poverty and power expressed in such rallies, asking why it is that my own government won’t arrest white men carrying guns at state houses, but black men still get run down and shot to death by vigilantes that have worked for law enforcement.  I’ll continue to use the power of my presence, placing my body in places of ideological contest to be a peaceful, non-violent presence while retaining my soft and caring manhood.

I will also continue to stand with the religious minorities of this country who continue to be hazed, proselytized, and discriminated against if they don’t agree with the Christian Supremacy of the Religious Right.  I’ll join with those of other cultures around the world in exposing the military and economic abuses of my own country, such as calling for an end to the sanctions and impoverishment of Venezuela and Iran and calling for the cessation of military preparations against these countries.  I’ll keep telling the stories that don’t make our corporate news systems, such as the years of drought and US foreign policy interventions in Central America that have forced whole villages to flee to our borders to survive.  If Trump believes that American faith traditions support this, he is sadly mistaken.  He has confused the Colonial Christianity of the Religious Right with the movements of faith that led persecuted religious minorities to come here in search of genuine freedom – to live and thrive with the freedom of conscience, speech and the press he so clearly despises.

And, I will continue to point out all of the intersections of these forms of colonialism perpetrated by my own country, which likes to think of itself as a bastion of freedom and Democracy, while tearing it down around the world when it doesn’t suit the interests of our multi-national corporate masters.  Viewing today’s order to call all houses of faith essential in light of all of these issues, we must beware of any group that seeks to marry the interests of one faith tradition with political power.  We won’t go back to the religious wars of a Europe with state religions, and will continue to point out how his preferred policies of Religious Right have become dangerously close to an establishment of religion in the public sphere.  Especially during a pandemic that clearly hasn’t been prepared for enough, I will join the leaders of my congregation by protecting the people of my congregation from such nonsense.  We will continue to stand up as different form of Post-colonial Christianity that seeks the best for all of our neighbors, not just some.  We will continue protect the LGBTQ community from the “religious freedom” policies being enacted and recognize them publicly as a form of political discrimination on behalf of the Religious Right.  We will stand with our faith partners of every stripe, resisting the policies and bombast that demean their full humanity and freedom to practice their own culture and religion without harassment or demands to act or sound more like white “Christians.”  And, we will do so because of our faith.

Will you join me?

Stay awake.

Rev. Will McGarvey

 

 

 

 

For all of those being Crucified these days – for those incarcerated during a time of pandemic, for the separated families still in detention centers around the border, for those shot down in their own houses of worship because of our gun laws, for those in Iran and Venezuela who may die for lack of medical supplies because of US sieges against their countries, for the LGBTQ people literally crucified by the so-called Daesh and other terrorists, for political prisoners executed and hung in Saudi Arabia, for those who live under the threat of being lynched anywhere, for those with black lung disease because they worked in coal mines, for those who die of air pollution for corporate profit, for health care workers not given the PPE and tools they need to protect themselves and others, for those living without shelter who now have no place to go for restrooms or food or help, for those who have lost hope, for those who die alone, and for (please fill in with your list) _______________________________________.

O G-d, make the Empires stop, take away their power to do harm, and wake up your people to say “never again” for the last time in any of our memories…

May the “angel of death” pass over us all, regardless of the color of our lintels or the names of the divine to which we pray…